Rat infestation has Parisians watching step

Some methods of pest control banned by EU

PARIS — Both Nadine Mahe des Portes and the rat panicked when she inadvertently stepped on it on her walk back from work through Paris.

“I heard a terrible squeak,” the property agent recalled with a shudder. “I thought I’d stepped on a child’s toy or something.”

When Parisians are literally tripping over rats on the sidewalk, it is clear that the City of Light has a problem. Professional exterminators with decades on the job struggle to recall infestations as impressive — perhaps that should be repulsive — as those now forcing the closure of Paris parks, where squirmy clumps of rats brazenly feed in broad daylight, looking like they own the place.

On Friday, City Hall threw open one of the closed parks, the Tour Saint-Jacques square a block from the Seine, to show journalists its latest anti-rat drive. The park in the heart of the city is only a short walk from the Pompidou art museum. Two Japanese tourists searching for Notre Dame cathedral, also just minutes away, didn’t notice the rats in bushes just in front of them when they stopped to ask for directions.

The furry princes of the city were all over the park, sauntering across the footpaths, merrily grazing in the undergrowth and far more bothered by pigeons competing with them for breadcrumbs than by people walking past and the rattle and hum of the morning rush hour.

Unfortunately for City Hall’s exterminators, they also seemed totally uninterested in recently laid traps baited with poison.

The park attendant, Patrick Lambin, said his morning round had yielded just one cadaver.

Before the park was closed in November, rats foraging for food hung like grapes off the trash bins and regularly scampered through the children’s play area, sowing panic, he said.

Lambin suspects the infestation has been made worse by Parisians and tourists who leave food out for the pigeons and, in particular, a homeless man who swings by most mornings with bags of stale bread recovered from local eateries.

And European Union rules governing the arsenal of poisons and traps that can be used against rats have complicated the job of extermination, he said.

FRANCOIS MORI/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS A city employee shows a dead rat Friday in the Saint Jacques Tower park, in the center of Paris. The park had been closed because of the level of infestation. The city is on a new rampage against rats, trying to shrink the growing population.